| Sumario: | Public expenditure is a powerful instrument for governments to use in achieving sustainable growth, poverty reduction, and transformation. Understanding the linkages between different types of public expenditure and development can help governments to better allocate their resources in a manner consistent with their policy objectives and citizens’ needs and priorities. Development practitioners, donors, and the general public have increasingly requested expenditure accountability and transparency in the use of public resources. Transparency in public spending allows governments to better track, monitor, and evaluate the impacts of investment decisions and to invest in the provision of public goods and services that benefit the rural poor (such as agricultural research and extension, health, education, and social protection) and provide a conducive environment for private-sector investments. Against this background, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) launched and made publicly available the Statistics on Public Expenditures for Economic Development (SPEED) database in 2010. The database aims to provide policymakers, researchers, and the broader development community with the most comprehensive public expenditure information. This is the third major update of the dataset since 2010 (the second major update was made available in 2013). This third update includes an expanded time coverage, 1980 to 2012, and an additional economic sector, fuels and energy. While data were not always available for all the 147 countries included in the dataset, significant efforts were made in updating the data for as many countries as possible. This 2015 version includes a total of ten sectors: agriculture, communication, education, defense, health, mining, social protection, fuel and energy, transport, and transport and communication (as a group). Prior to 1990, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) presented the expenditures on transport and communications as one combined sector. Since 1990, the expenditures have been reported separately as two sectors. The new version of the SPEED dataset presents the expenditures on the two sectors separately as well as combined for completeness of information.
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